Where did the name Knoah come from?
What is Knoah’s mission?
What are Knoah's key benefits to prospective clients?
What practices has Knoah implemented to address issues with language accents and time zone differences?
How much can I save by outsourcing with Knoah?
How are you different from your competitors?
How do you ensure customer satisfaction?
Do you ensure privacy and security for my customers and their information?
"There has been a great deal of controversy regarding outsourcing. Some say this trend is dangerous to the American economy, resulting in loss of white collar jobs, dangers of Middle East turmoil and terrorism, customer insecurity that their data is safe, and more." What is Knoah’s position on these issues?
Who are your customers?
Do you offer 24x7 support?
When were you founded and who are its investors?
Where are you located?
How do I find out more?
Where did the name Knoah come from?
Knoah's name is derived from two basic elements. The first is Knowledge. The founders of the company are experts in call centers and call center technology, particularly knowledge management and electronic support. The K in Knoah is our ability to use that knowledge to create a unique and powerful offshore outsourcing solution for our clients. The second part of the name is derived from the ancient story of Noah and the Ark. We see modern companies trying to compete in a global economy flooded with incoming customer communications. Our primary goal is to help forward thinking companies survive and thrive in this type of environment. Hence the name Knoah was born.
What is Knoah's mission?
Knoah's mission is to be the leading global provider of outsourced, high-quality contact centers and business process outsourcing (BPO) services, enabling companies to offer superior customer care and services at a very low cost. Knoah is achieving this goal through its skilled workforce in the areas of Email, Chat, Voice and BPO services, supported by experienced operations staff and a unique knowledge management infrastructure, all located in state-of-the-art offshore facilities in India, Asia.
What are Knoah's key benefits to prospective clients?
- Knoah is an offshore outsourcing company providing the best multi-channel customer service and technical support for technology products and services, enabling US call center quality at competitive offshore prices
- Knoah prides itself on being responsive and adaptive to client-driven business needs while at the same time proactively working with its customers to evolve more effective processes and systems through internal analysis
- Knoah continues to invest in its own innovative software suite (KnoahsARKT) to improve its management and operational efficiencies, making the company more flexible and less dependent on other vendor products for maintaining and improving customer service
- Knoah's rigorous 360* quality, training and internal feedback systems ensure world-class agent skills and performance
What practices has Knoah implemented to address issues with language accents and time zone differences?
Effective communication is the key to providing high quality support. Because Knoah handles both eSupport and Voice support, we need our agents to be proficient in both written and oral communications. Every new candidate we hire is put through a 3-4 week formal training process that is geared exclusively to American language (written and oral) and cultural. This program was developed through a partnership with local academic and professional training institutes to insure the best possible results for our candidates. Our full time training staff delivers the training to our new hires and they must pass a rigorous final certification before they are allowed to begin domain training for a given client.
Providing world-class customer service and quality to US companies requires that Knoah operate its business based on US business hours. To provide balance for employees required to work graveyard shifts, Knoah has implemented a rotating shift schedule. The rotating shift schedule allows our eSupport employees to spend 1-2 weeks a month on a more "normal" work day schedule. This gives our agents more variety in their day-to-day work, reduces burn-out, and allows them to have family time for a good portion of their monthly work schedule. Our rotating shift schedule is one of the reasons Knoah has one of the lowest turnover rates in India.
How much can I save by outsourcing with Knoah?
Offshore outsourcing of call center activities to Knoah can save companies anywhere from 40-60% over maintaining those operations in the US. The amount of the savings really depends upon where the US client is located, as different regions have different wage rates for support people. It also depends upon the technical nature of the support task. More technical tasks tend to command higher priced folks and are ripe for more savings by offshoring. Finally, it depends on whether the call center is inbound or outbound. Outbound call centers tend to have lower skilled and lower paid individuals (i.e., telemarketing people) making the advantages of offshoring a bit lower.
How are you different from your competitors?
We believe that effective outsourcing requires a strong linkage with our clients at all levels of the organization from executive management down to the agent level. By understanding our client's operation and culture at a deeper level, we can be more responsive to issues and opportunities when they arise. This leads to better results, lower costs and greater customer satisfaction. This is known as a "co-managed" outsourcing strategy, and it is at the core of our corporate philosophy.
Knoah prides itself on being "easier to work with" than our competition on everything from contract negotiations and delivering on SLAs, to handling spikes in volume and tackling tough support queues. It's our integrity, cooperative attitude and hard work that separates us from the competition at a strategic level.
From a tactical perspective, Knoah's strength lies in our ability to deliver the full range of support channels (Voice, email, and chat) to our clients. We encourage our clients to start slow and small and then grow as they gain confidence in our ability to deliver the results they expect. Then, once we have demonstrated a deep knowledge of the client's domain and the ability to deliver high quality results we are often called upon to scale up operations to reap the true benefit of offshore outsourcing. We have the patience and commitment to get things right first, and the infrastructure and experience to scale up quickly and effectively when called upon.
Finally, we believe that one of our most competitive advantages stems from our understanding of Enterprise software in support of CRM. The founders of Knoah came from the CRM and eCRM software market and worked with dozens of call centers to implement state-of-the-art solutions in knowledge management and eCRM.
We use this expertise to help our clients in two important ways. First, we help our clients maximize their use of the CRM tools they may already have in house to support transaction management and knowledge management. We can help them create a better balance between support channels, including self-service, to maximize customer satisfaction and minimize cost.
The second way we use our expertise in enterprise software development is in the creation of a proprietary software infrastructure called KnoahsARK. KnoahsARK is a web-based, modular, enterprise class software application that helps us manage our operations more efficiently and effectively than our competition. This tool blends together five key components to effective customer support outsourcing that don't exist in any single commercially available tool: Training, Quality, Knowledge management, Workforce management, and reporting. With it we are able to get our staff trained faster, produce better quality results, deliver higher productivity with the right level of staffing and provide the kind of instantaneous visibility to our clients that should be expected when work is being done half a world away.
How do you ensure customer satisfaction?
Knoah's primary goal is providing the highest level of customer satisfaction to our client's customers. We build aggressive targets for customer satisfaction in our contracted SLA's so our client's know we mean business with respect to providing not just similar service to their in-house teams but superior service. Knoah is able to deliver on the aggressive CSAT requirements by utilizing our KnoahsARKT operations software. KnoahsARKT allows us to map customer surveys by recording calls, which then drive agent performance to meet CSAT goals.
Do you ensure privacy and security for my customers and their information?
Data security and customer privacy are important issues regardless of whether work is performed in the US or offshore. The key to minimizing these issues is to have a combination of good management, clearly defined and enforced policies, robust technology infrastructure that is constantly monitored and controlled, and a workforce that is treated well and fairly. Knoah has excelled in ALL of these areas. Without them we would not have been entrusted with our client's customer information and would have failed as a business.
From a specific security perspective, Knoah employs several approaches to insure our facilities, networks, and client data are protected 24/7. At the physical level, entry and exit points are secured with both keycard and human guards checking picture ID's. All visitors are escorted and badged at all times. IT rooms are provided with additional keycard entry that is restricted to IT personnel only. At the network level, we require password access to all computers and client network systems. We monitor our networks 24/7 to insure both uptime and to prevent misuse. We have redundant firewalls with built in virus protection to keep out malicious entry. Finally, we support DES3 VPN networking to securely connect our operations to our client's networks.
There has been a great deal of controversy regarding outsourcing. Some say this trend is dangerous to the American economy, resulting in loss of white collar jobs, dangers of Middle East turmoil and terrorism, customer insecurity that their data is safe, and more. What is Knoah's position on these issues?
Offshore outsourcing in the industrial and manufacturing areas of the economy has been going on for decades, and while this has caused displacement of US jobs in those specific areas it has created opportunities for growth in other areas and has improved the overall standard of living in the US by keeping the costs of the products and services we buy lower for longer periods of time. We believe that outsourcing of "white collar" jobs, while difficult for those that are displaced, will similarly yield a net benefit to the overall US economy by keeping companies profitable and stabilizing their costs in the face of global competition. Since white collar jobs are typically staffed with people who have a higher level of education, those that are displaced should have an easier time with the task of retraining and taking advantage of new opportunities that will come with faster economic growth in an increasingly technology and knowledge driven world.
There are certainly legitimate risks that come with offshore outsourcing that require careful thought on the part of the company considering this approach. Government turmoil and terrorism exist all over the world to a greater or lesser extent, including Western countries. We believe that India, as the world's largest secular democracy, has the best combination of social philosophy, government stability, capitalist ideals and educational approach to minimize the inherent risks of offshore outsourcing from these problems.
Data security and customer privacy are important issues regardless of whether work is performed in the US or offshore. The key to minimizing these issues is to have a combination of good management, clearly defined and enforced policies, robust technology infrastructure that is constantly monitored and controlled, and a workforce that is treated well and fairly. Knoah has excelled in ALL of these areas. Without them we would not have been entrusted with our client's customer information and would have failed as a business.
Who are your customers?
Knoah's services are targeted at industries that require high levels of customer satisfaction to drive competitive advantage, but have to deal with a wide range of potentially complex customer issues. Our customers include:
- Telecommunications and ISPs.
- High technology companies (Software, Networking, Hardware, etc.).
- Financial and Banking.
- Insurance.
- Consumer electronics.
To date we are providing offshore outsourcing services to one of the worlds largest ISPs and one of the worlds largest networking companies.
Do you offer 24/7 support?
Yes, Knoah currently offers 24/7 support to our clients, and is actively running a 24/7 operation for our existing clients.
When were you founded and who are its investors?
Knoah was founded in November of 2000. Knoah is a privately held company currently supported with seed funding from a small number of angel investors.
Where are you located?
Our corporate headquarters is in San Rafael, California. Our India offices are located in Hyderabad
How do I find out more?
If you are interested in finding out more about Knoah, please drop us an e-mail at info@knoah.com.
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